Judge vs. Silicon Valley on patent reform

SAN JOSE, Calif. – A former top U.S. federal judge said he may create a small but high-level lobbying group in support of intellectual property. Paul Michel suggested the group could press for more funding for the U.S. patent office and try to counter patent reform efforts he said were driven by a small group of mainly Silicon Valley giants.

Separate, broad and controversial patent reform bills have been stalled in the Senate and House of representatives for nearly a year. Companies including Cisco Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft have pushed for reforms that reduce patent litigation.

"Fifteen companies out of the 30,000 [in the U.S. with at least 100 employees] have driven the whole patent reform movement in the Congress, [and] they’re nearly all either Silicon Valley so-called high tech equipment or chip makers or Wall Street financial firms," said Michel in a wide-ranging interview on the IPWatchdog Web site.

"I just think it’s astounding that 15 companies could create such an amount of political power when what they’re recommending looks to me like it will be on the whole detrimental to all the other companies, universities, independent inventors, and research institutes," said Michel who retired May 31 as Chief Judge of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

At least a dozen groups including companies, law firms and trade groups have said they would join or contribute to such a group, Michel said.

"I think it’s entirely possible to motivate 150 CEOs…and that’s exactly what I’m engaged in trying to do, is to try to motivate a small segment of business leaders and a small segment of the media to get knowledgeable, get involved, get motivated, and get active," he said. "I think it will make a huge difference," he added.

In late July, Michel was named the first Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation, a non-profit group dedicated to educating the public on the importance of intellectual property rights to innovation and the economy. Michel also was elected recently to serve on the Foundation's board of directors for a two-year term.

I agree that more than 9 out of 10 patent applications should be rejected based on the "obvious to one skilled in the art" criteria. A lot more should be rejected simply for not being inventive, not advancing the state of the art.
Combine those two criteria and you probably end up with 1 out of 100 patent applications that are worthwhile and actually demonstrate innovation.

It is well past time for patent reform of some sort. However, letting the big companies drive the process is probably not the way to go, but unfortunately their lobbying groups carry a lot of clout with Congress. Intellectual property needs to be protected, but the patent office in its current form does not have the capacity (and probably not the capability) to do so effectively. Hopefully the judge will have some success where others have failed in the past.

You are are right,
It is surely disgusting only a few stakeholders can not make changes in the patents regulations.
The systems is beyond control due to globalization and internet.
But the time will suggest some new systems and it will come up automatically, we will have to wait for that we will have to wait for time.

Anything Microsoft is proposing needs to be opposed or we'll be eating dirt and living in grass huts.
The patent system is broken, but the "repairs" proposed by the monopolies are not ones we would want.
I think the whole system should be scrapped completely. We would have more innovation and creativity and product choice if the patents are discontinued and the patent office is closed.

I don't agree with the judge at all. The US patent system is broken in multiple ways. It is an archaic system more than 140 years old. In my opinion the worst deficiency comes from the attitude of the patent office. The patent office considers itself to be there to issue patents, not fight fradulent or obvious patents. Rather than study the background in detail, they give the benefit of doubt to the so-called inventor, and say "let them fight it out in courts". We need a patent office that scrutinizes every detail and history and fights the patent applicant tooth and nail to force the applicant to prove the worthiness and the novelty and the non-obviousness of the invention. It is my opinion that more than 9 out of 10 patents that goes through the US patent office should be considered invalid based on the "obvious to an expert" criterion.
This deficinecy I described above hurts everybody at different times, all companies big and small suffer from it. The only people who like it as is are the "patent trolls".

In spite of our present economic climate, the US patent process must continue to balance the interest of individual, startup and public research institutions as patent reform continues through the congressional bill approval process.
The parts of the bill addressing a Post Grant Review process could result in putting some patents on a path to easy challenge, with the opposition motivated, not necessarily in trying to invalidate the patent—but simply employing procedural litigation activity.
Efforts to speed the patent review process on the pre-grant side through the utilization of a “broader peer and individual skill-level reviews” would mean involving more engineers in the process – and this utilization of additional talent means more engineers working!
Funding for "more staff in the USPTOP" is long over due!

About the only thing we can get widespread agreement on is that the US patent system is broken. The root causes and proposed solutions are the subjects of great disagreements, but I like this judge's idea of hiring unemployed engineers as patent examiners and funding the USPTO to do a much better job.
There are many ways the system could be reformed, but a really good start would be to get a lot more engineers to apply their individual domain expertise to reviewing new applications with a critical eye.
There also needs to be a culture change at the USPTO. The judge is right, the system started to fall apart in the 1990s when the USPTO started taking an attitude of "let them fight it out in court" and allowed just about anything to become a new patent, in many cases with broad claims that overlapped earlier patents.

The US must be re-educated on the value of patent and IPR. It is strange that the only factor that separates the developed and developed world, IPR, remains clouded in the giant USA. It is time government puts money and modernize the patent office. A patent I sent three years ago is not done. Why? They use really retired people to examine some concepts I think its pretty new they can make a clue about it. This must change